Stuff

by Stefan Mohamed

  Scene:

  Or Lee gets punched, hard, really hard, and Laika and I, separately, miles apart, cry out and fall to our knees, our noses bleeding, really bleeding.

  WHAT’S EXPECTED

  I feel as though I haven’t really gone about things in the normal, expected way. I mean, I did what you’re supposed to do when you’re a teenager, i.e. hate every single fucking minute of it and not have a clue who or what you are, but then aren’t you supposed to start experimenting with whatever in college, then blossom into who you actually are in university, with plenty more experimentation along the way, before graduating into some form of related employment, or at least non-suicidal-making employment, experimentation done, ready to spend your twenties in your first sensible (i.e. non-suicidal-making) relationship, then become slowly more boring in your thirties, etc, until death? Is that what’s expected?

  If it’s not, then I’m not sure where I got that from.

  But at any rate, it’s not exactly how I’ve done things.

  What I have done is spend a lot of time worrying that the way I’m doing things isn’t the way I’m supposed to be doing things, and that there’s a generally accepted standard of how to go about things, and an average trajectory, and that if I sat down with a representative of this way of thinking and told them how I’ve gone about things, then they’d say I’d done it all wrong and was getting a failing grade.

  Hashtag stating the f&^%ing obvious?!!1 ROFLMFAOYSST.

  DOODLING ABSENT-MINDEDLY DURING A LUNCH BREAK

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  All first world white people problems and no play make Lucy a dull girl.

  I TURN 24

  I ran from that house, ran, ran, ran, and the rest of the day blurs, more so than any other day, and it’s the first proper snap of collapse, the first oh God fuck this has all gone horribly wrong, because I went to see Lee that night, either I did or Laika did, or maybe I even went back to see Laika, I don’t know, none of us fucking know, too much emotion, too much memory, too much, or at least we didn’t know at the time, not until much later, and even then we didn’t really know, we just figured it into a digestible shape (separately, of course), based on whatever we wanted to have happened. So maybe I went to Lee, to demand that he keep those horrible thoughts to himself, I didn’t care what he and Laika had been doing behind my back but I wanted no knowledge of it, keep it to your fucking self Lee, and somehow the feelings I’d felt for Laika bubbled up in him and he saw her in me and I saw her in him and we ended up thrashing around on the floor while Laika Tweeted that she’d rather be with whichever one of us wasn’t there, except she wasn’t there, or I wasn’t. Or maybe Lee was the one who wasn’t there, maybe I went back to see Laika and apologise, and we ended up thrashing around together, like we’d almost but never quite done several times at that point, but one or other of us (I wonder why) wanted it to be Lee, and then that was the first of many stray thoughts that got let loose on the Internet, for all to see, ready to break the back of whichever stupid embarrassed camel wasn’t actually there.

  Either way, whichever way, any which way but LOSER loose, it wasn’t long after this that I made Laika a CD. And she never said thank you. Not ever.

  TRACK 1) RETROGRADE – JAMES BLAKE

  I was aware of James Blake, vaguely, but hadn’t listened to him extensively – I know he did a cover of Limit To Your Love but I liked the Feist version just fine, thanks.

  Then I heard this one, the first time (more than one first time – first, don’t forget that if you’re firsting on an article then you get canceraids / this is completely irrelevant, thanks Lee’s effing Internet brain), and it had been oh so quiet as we sat on that rug, the soft fluffy concentric red yellow blue circle rug, within which we would conduct so much of our brain-expanding business, and Lee put this on, and it starts so quietly, so quietly, that bare bones pulse of beat and his voice, his voice that had never spoken to me before, except now it did, it cut right through me, everything is overgrown, and then the rising synth pulse, rising outside and also inside, in my belly, up and up, and then boom

  SUDDENLY I’M HIT

  and like the film cliché it was, we fell back and our heads struck soft floor and

  we sank, right down, rrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiight the waaaaaaaaaaay dowwwwwwwwwwwwn, but also up, and everything collapsed around us, and when the song had faded something else had grown, something brand new, completely covering what had been there before.

  It seemed obvious to put it at the beginning of Laika’s CD. Maybe too obvious?

  WHEN I GROW UP

  I want to be a:

  Novelist

  Poet

  Music critic

  Chronicler of the collapse of society

  Factory worker

  Samurai whore

  Superstar DJ

  Soft machine

  Fucking psychoooooo

  WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

  Oh God. I have no idea. No fucking idea at all.

  BIOGRAPHY

  I was born in 1990. Mother, father, older brother, older sister. First love: Mikey Green. We bonded over Sega. I always kind of knew that he loved Streets of Rage more than he loved me. First hate: Michelle Greene. She put chewing gum in my hair. Eventually I would kill her, and bury her in some nearby woods, and nobody would ever know.

  We didn’t have much money. I hid in my brain. Played there. Lived and breathed my characters and stories. Peeled back the horrible old wallpaper and wrote secret poems there, hid them behind the mouldy strips, left them there for future lonely children to find, and take some kind of comfort from, or maybe something else. My siblings and I would sometimes make the trek to the Bellows – no-one know why it was called that, it was just an area of grubby land with some interesting trees, by the river – and play, and inevitably they would end up turning on me, because I was the smallest.

  TO FIND OUT WHETHER I REALLY DID KILL MICHELLE GREENE AND BURY HER BODY IN THE WOODS, RE-READ THIS BIT AND USE YOUR BLOODY BRAIN

  SPECCS

  So Lee bought these things, Speccs, like Google Glass or whatever but made by some other company, and apparently “better”, because “contrary to what dickheads think, Google does do evil, industrial quantities of evil”, according to Lee, who oddly enough has no problem owning everything Apple ever puts out even though their serfs literally hurl themselves off buildings to escape the pain of putting the fucking things together (Laika once told me she understands my annoyance over this hypocrisy, as I called it, but that actually it wasn’t that big a contradiction, and it was all right, and sod it, Apple tech is pretty cool), but anyway. So he bought these glasses, with the same weird limitless stash of mo
ney that enables him to buy all the aforementioned Apple products. And these things allow you “to interact on a more personal level with your computer”, apparently, and to fully immerse yourself in whatever you’re doing, almost like VR but not quite, not exactly. But they’re augmented reality, or whatever, and we were augmenting our reality on the regular, so of course it was only a short step from Lee showing us how he could update his Twitter no-handed, or play games with his eyes, to us deciding to take a load of Stuff and experiment with the Speccs.

  And holy bollocks, man.

  That was some point-of-no-return shit right there.

  TO FIND OUT WHAT IT’S LIKE TO USE TECHNOLOGY WITH NEAR-VR CAPABILITIES WHILE UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF A MYSTERIOUS PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCE WITH TELEPATHIC ELEMENTS, GO TO THE BIT WHERE THAT HAPPENS, IT’S AHEAD BUT NOT VERY FAR (I THINK)

  TO FIND OUT WHAT THE CONSEQUENCES WERE, KEEP READING AFTER THAT

  TRACK 7) DEAR PRUDENCE – THE BEATLES

  Either Laika or I had never really listened to The Beatles. Not sure which. And so one day, after a particularly fierce binge of various things with a layer of Stuff on top, we were at Laika’s (Lee had to go somewhere, I didn’t care know where) and one of us put Dear Prudence on, saying something along the lines of omg u never listnd 2 da beetles??? SRSLY?????!!! and we had a brief chat about how important they were. At this point (as in now) I think that Laika was the one who’d never really listened to them. But it could easily have been me. Doesn’t really matter though, does it?

  The song was written about Prudence Farrow, sister of Mia, the actress, who I think had Rosemary’s baby. They had been there in India when The Beatles and their wives and I think a Beach Boy went out to listen to the Maharishi talk for days and days. And Ringo had fucked off because who needs that shit in your life when you’re Ringo, when you can just go home and beat your wife narrate Thomas the Tank Engine. And Prudence wouldn’t come out of somewhere, or something – maybe the Maharishi tried to get it on with her and she wasn’t keen? Or something? And I think they had to persuade her to come out. And then John Lennon wrote this song about her.

  The film Across The Universe, which is a musical with Beatles songs for its songs, and which I think is really underrated, if thuddingly literal at points, uses Dear Prudence for a scene in which a character called Prudence (who is a lesbian, natch) won’t come out of a closet. And then she comes out. It’s not a great version.

  Anyway. All that is basically what we talked about. Music journalism. Cultural archaeology. Half-remembered maybe-facts. We giggled a lot, at any rate, and then listened to the song, let it wash over our exhausted, tingling selves. Soul soup.

  ‘You don’t care about things the way Lee does, do you?’

  ‘Haha. No. But honestly, I don’t think that Lee cares about things the way he wants everyone to think he cares about things.’

  ‘I suppose. Yeah, I see what you mean.’

  ‘I mean, he does care, obviously. He hates injustice. He hates the idea of profit over compassion, money being more important than people. But . . . I don’t know. People at the extreme ends of opinions and feelings are often more likely to get shit done than people who linger in the middle and see both sides . . . but they’re also the most annoying. I find violently left-wing people just as irritating and self-righteous as right-wing types.’

  ‘Yeah. But . . . is that true? Or are people in the middle more likely to get shit done because they’re willing to compromise, or whatever?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or maybe shit just doesn’t get done.’ Shrug. ‘I don’t know. Basically, caring as much as Lee cares would just be so fucking exhausting.’

  Later, there was a private message waiting for us on Facebook, from Lee. All it said was I do care. We didn’t ever talk about it in person.

  CHARITY

  The next day I went into the centre of town to wander around some shops and look at things I couldn’t afford, ‘cos that’s a thing that people do, and there were some charity fundraisers dotting about. Usually I tried to avoid them but today I suddenly felt not just bad for them, but for everyone, and for whoever they were representing in particular. And I talked to one, and listened to everything they had to say, and I cried, and I signed up to a monthly payment, even though I couldn’t really afford it. ‘Cos I’m a fucking saint.

  SPECCS CONTINUED

  The interface is pretty intuitive, a combination of eye movements, timed blinking (only certain rhythms of blinking, obviously, otherwise you’d have to keep your eyes open the entire time), hand gestures and of course speech, and before you know it you’re in, opening and closing and maximising and minimising, dragging and dropping, communicating. Ingesting knowledge. You’re immersed in an article, and you don’t recognise a word, or a phrase or a reference or something, and a little flick of your eye and a double wink, and you’ve got the nearest and most reliable (as chosen by the manufacturer, who I suppose you have to hope has the right credentials to decide such things) reference to whatever it is you want to know. It’s like the Internet, but better. Faster. Flashier too. The HUD (that’s heads up display – Lee’s all about such jargon) is all pretty, and there are loads of cool menu animations. I was resistant initially, but it becomes such fun after not very long.

  You can wander around with it, too. Remotely access your social media sites. Do updates while running, hands free. Look at a tree and be told what it is, and access as much or as little history about it as you want. ‘It’s like the most essential inessential thing ever,’ said Laika. I agreed. Proper cool, though. I wished I could afford my own pair. So shiny. And then Lee bought two more so we could use them together.

  This was maybe the fifth time we took Stuff (as a three, so it was my sixth). The first time was the first time. Second was at Laika’s. Third was that party with Cokey Guy. Fourth was by the sea – holy crap. Fifth was out in the countryside. Maybe? So yeah, sixth.

  SIXTH

  So there were funny aspects: getting lost in the comments on a Gawker article about the birth of some baby pandas; the way the funny comments tickled; riding around and around in animated GIFs, looping deliriously; popping over to Twitter periodically (literally popping) to deliver updates like urhghghraaaaammmm, slipperyslipperyslippery, nommnnnooommmmnommn etc; falling eyeballs-first into an online version of Pac-Man, ooh ghosts oh shit ghosts haha grab the cherry grab the cherry GRAB THE FUCKING CHERRY ha ha; swinging through my email inbox, getting into a new email (represented by a giant envelope, obvz) and sending myself over to Lee’s inbox to meet him and Laika, where we danced around in a sea of penis enlargement spam and notifications about purchases from Amazon; re-arranging the letters in angry YouTube comments to make them either nonsensical or friendly; Laika’s face when we first realised that we were lost on a porn site.

  And there were sexy aspects. Getting over being lost, and exploring said porn site, for example. Initial thoughts of wow, am I doing it wrong giving way to woah, why would anyone even want to try that, that’s not supposed to go there. So it was funny as well. But you kind of couldn’t help but get caught up in some of the videos.

  The scary stuff didn’t come until later.

  LATER

  ‘I just don’t understand why anyone would write such things,’ said Mum. ‘Can you report it to the Facebook?’

  ‘I deleted the post,’ I said. ‘Just some hacker or something. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘But such dreadful things! Torture! Murder! You could get in trouble with the police!’

  Note to self: have a look at my privacy settings.

  And think better thoughts.

  #ROCKBOTTOM

  I never wanted you.

  You’re a liar. You’re fucking lying to me. How can you say that?

  The whole thing was a mess from start to finish. We were all one big mess. None of us knew where one ended and the others began.

 
But you did know. I felt it. I was in your brain. I saw me through your eyes.

  They weren’t my eyes. Not really.

  They were.

  How do you even know whether your thoughts were real?

  What?

  How do you know that what you think you felt, or feel, is real?

  Because I know. I just fucking know, like you knew. Like I knew you knew.

  Thought I knew.

  So what, now not only do I not really know what you feel, I don’t even know what I feel?

  I don’t know that you do.

  You don’t know that I don’t.

  This is ridiculous.

  I gave you everything. Literally. Nobody in the history of human relationships has ever given themselves as fully as me. They couldn’t.

  I’m not saying I don’t appreciate that. That I wasn’t moved. But it wasn’t what you thought it was.

  You said that friends like to share.

  Not everything. You think that I know you as well as you know yourself?